Nicholas Megalis returns with a bunch of new songs about Ohio

Nicholas Megalis

Nicholas Megalis isn't like most 20-year-olds. He isn't on Facebook, he doesn't have a driver's license, he hasn't been to college and he's never had a crappy job.

The singer-songwriter isn't like most local artists either. He
doesn't play industrial-sized metal or bar-band punk. In fact, he
doesn't play music that's at all classifiable. He calls it "piano
rock," but that isn't quite right. The elusive, obscure and often
challenging songs that Megalis writes and performs are often
one-man-band bedroom projects that are just as much inspired by Ornette
Coleman's free-form aural explorations as they are T.Rex's fuzzbox
stomps. And it's one of the freshest sounds coming out of Cleveland
right now.

Megalis first started making music when he was 15. An open-mic in
Parma convinced him it might be a good career. "I made it a show," he
recalls. "I invited everybody in my grade. I packed the place." In 2006
he recorded his debut album, I See the Moon, at Cleveland's Ante
Up Audio. Two years later he released a follow-up, Praise Be, Hype
Machine. He's performed at just about every club in town. He toured
the country. He even opened for Nine Inch Nails when they played
Quicken Loans Arena in 2008. His songs were featured on MTV's The
Real World and Road Rules. And earlier this year he
self-recorded and –released a free online EP, I Find It Sexy
How You Mislead Me.

In January, Megalis moved to New York "for music," he says. "I
wanted to play all those venues." He brought all his instruments
— keyboards, guitars, an accordion, the Wurlitzer — with
him, rented a "walk-in closet" apartment in Brooklyn, and started
writing and recording. "But the songs I was writing weren't about New
York," he says. "All my songs were about things I did in Ohio." (One of
the songs Megalis wrote and recorded in New York is called "God Bless
Ohio.")

So he returned to his parents' Broadview Heights home a month ago.
Megalis says he was supposed to come home before that; he ended up
staying in New York a little longer than he anticipated (his
girlfriend, a Kent State University fashion student, was also living in
NYC at the time). "My plan is to live in Cleveland," he says. "I want
to have my base here and tour out from here. Cleveland is my favorite
place in the world."

Given the nature of his unconventional and often personal take on
pop music (most of his songs clock in at around two minutes), Megalis
is one of the most grounded and affable artists you'll ever meet. He's
got rock-star looks, complete with a flop of unruly hair that hangs
down over his forehead. Onstage, he sports guyliner and tight red
pants. No surprise that a huge chunk of his 23,000 MySpace friends are
girls. "I'm an abusive MySpacer," he admits.

Since he's been back, Megalis has been trying to write. But he got
bronchitis right before he left New York. You can still hear the strain
in his voice as he talks. He even turns away from me a few times to
cough. "It's hard," he says. "I can't do anything when I'm like
this."

There's a new album in the works, which he's going to record at Ante
Up again next month. This time, he says, he wants to go into the studio
with his stage band (a drummer and guitar player), play it live with
few overdubs and immediately put it out. "I hope it's released the day
after I do it," he says. "I don't want to wait around for the record to
get mastered and mixed. The more you sit around, the more you realize
you don't like it."

As usual, the new songs are personal and honest reflections of
Megalis' life, with some typically twisty detours. No rock-star
navel-gazing or pretensions here. "Singer-songwriters are so
manipulative," he says. "'This song is about my breakup in 1996.' I
hate telling people about my music. My job is to write things that
people can apply accordingly to whatever they want."